Fortney: Prisoner 88 devoted life to Holocaust education

Calgary-08/24/01-Sigmund Sobolewski looks back on his time at Auschwitz as he is informed of a $15,000 cheque he will be given as compensation for the work he did while in the concentration camp. He is pictured here in a replica uniform holding a letter the camp sent to his mother along with his clothes, leaving her to believe that he was dead. Photo by Jenelle Schneider/Calgary Herald (

Over the span of nearly a century, Sigmund Sobolewski’s life journey took him around the world and in roles that included welder, entrepreneur and activist.

His greatest and most cherished role, though, was as a husband and father. “My father was driven to make a family,” says his eldest of three sons, Simon Sobolewski. “He was absolutely devoted to us.”

Still, the former Calgarian, who died this past Monday at the age of 94, had another longstanding passion, one he shared not only with his wife Ramona and sons Simon, Emil and Vladimir, but also with people across the province.

“So much of his life was about bringing awareness of Auschwitz to Albertans,” says Simon, who spoke with me Tuesday afternoon from his home in Victoria. “He had a suspicion that the story wasn’t really getting out there, so he would talk to anyone willing to listen.”

Sobolewski knew all too well of the horrors of the concentration camp where more than one million people, most of them Jews, were murdered. In the summer of 1940, the 17-year-old Roman Catholic cadet was rounded up along with hundreds of his fellow Polish citizens and taken to the then little known camp, first constructed to house Polish political prisoners.

Two years later, tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners began arriving at Auschwitz; most would perish in its gas chambers. For the four years he was held prisoner, the intelligent teenager worked as a firefighter and, already proficient in Russian and German, learned to speak English from a fellow prisoner.

“This meant very often we had to leave the camp to fight a fire — two or three times a month after a bombardment,” Sobolewski told a reporter in 2011 of his job at the death camp.

“Auschwitz was in a heavily industrialized area that was often bombed … it gave us an opportunity to steal food,” he says of the daily deprivation where young men doing physical labour had to survive on fewer than 800 calories a day.

As the 88th prisoner to arrive, he was given the number 88; decades later, his memoir entitled Prisoner 88: The Man in Stripes, penned with his friend Rabbi Roy Tanenbaum, told of the horrors he witnessed, but also the humanity of his fellow prisoners.

In 2009, he penned a short piece in the Calgary Herald about a group of Jewish prisoners who burned down a crematorium and gas chamber.

“These Jewish prisoners of Hungarian and Russian origins lifted our spirits,” he wrote. “They proved that the SS were not invincible and that a day of reckoning was coming for their crimes.”

After gaining his freedom, Sobolewski came to Canada, first to Toronto. It was while working in Cuba in 1960 as part of an international workers’ brigade, that he met his wife Ramona. The pair married and had their first child, son Simon, then came to Canada.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the family lived in Calgary, Fort Assiniboine and Fort Macleod, where Sobolewski was well-known as both the proprietor of the Fort Macleod Hotel and a public speaker, travelling to schools and organizations across the province to talk about the Holocaust and his personal experiences as a prisoner.

After anticipating his own death for years as a concentration camp prisoner, very little scared Sobolewski. In 1985, he protested outside the trial of Jim Keegstra, the Eckville high school teacher and Holocaust denier who was convicted of promoting hatred against Jews; he also stood outside the barricades of an Aryan Nation gathering in Provost.

“He invited Keegstra to come with him to Auschwitz and even offered to pay his way,” says Simon Sobolewski. “Keegstra wrote to him and said no, the Jews built that (camp) as a fake news story.”

In his later years, the father and grandfather returned to Cuba with his wife. Having lived with Alzheimer’s the past several years, he died Monday morning.

While many will remember Sobolewski for his lifelong mission of teaching others about the Holocaust, those closest to him will cherish the memory of a loving, devoted family man.

“He wanted to make sure we did our best and we never gave up,” says Simon. “You give up in the camps and you’re dead.”

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